The Flames That Consume Us
by stefanie bean
Summary: Raoul is dead, and a daughter of the Vikings seeks revenge. Placed 7th out of 24th in the Third Morbidity Contest. Definitely morbid and disgusting.


**The Flames that Consume Us **

_Many thanks go to Jennie, my beta-reader and advisor on all things Scandinavian, who first told me about the old Swedish custom of "the bridegroom's shirt."_

After Erik kissed her on the forehead, he wiped his tears, replaced his black silk mask, and stumbled across the room.

"What's wrong?" Christine asked.

"Nothing," he answered. "I'm strained and fatigued. Now I'll go retrieve your young man."

He was gone a long, long time. She made tea, combed and re-braided her hair, dabbed rouge and brushed a little face powder onto her pallid complexion. Finally, the door to his apartments under the Opera Garnier opened with a click and a whoosh of air.

He was alone, and his clothes were covered with whitish dust.

She looked at him blankly, not comprehending. He said nothing and would not face her.

"Where's Raoul?" she asked, finally.

"Christine," he said smoothly. "It happened so suddenly … Please don't blame Erik. Your young man was in the first cell of the dungeon, the one on the edge of the limestone bluff. The door was jammed, and I forced it. It must have set up some kind of shock or wave … I couldn't do anything. Before I knew it, the ceiling had collapsed."

The room spun around her but she did not fall.

"What are you saying, Erik? Where is he?"

"Why do women never believe you the first time? Didn't you hear me? There was a cave-in in the cell. A collapse. There have to be ten tonnes of rock on top of him by now." He was silent for a long moment, kicking his heels together and fidgeting nervously. "It was an accident."

A thought of fire lacerated across her mind.

"Treachery," she hissed. "You lie."

He whirled on her, his eyes glowing like yellow coals. "Do you think that right after being snatched from the jaws of death Erik would betray you?"

Raoul's body, crushed and bleeding. His head, smashed like a bird's egg pushed out of the nest, its shell broken, the brains spilled like the squashed and half-formed life within. Everything collapsed down upon her as well.

She sank to the floor, her face buried in her hands. "Am I still free to go?" she asked, watching him through her fingers.

He threw up his hands. "Of course you are. Erik may break his oaths, but I don't."

"I want to see it," she said. "Take me to him."

He pulled her to her feet by her sleeves, reluctant to touch her skin.

All the way down the long dank path to the Communard prison, he marched straight ahead, avoiding her eyes.

They twisted around corners, walked over rotting planks that threatened to trap her shoes and skirts, and finally came to a corridor that stretched out into the dim greenish blackness. The door to one of the cells was open, and it was filled with rock.

"He's in there," Erik said.

"Dig him out," she commanded.

"I can't … I don't have the strength. I'm dying, I tell you."

"You had the strength to carry him, and the Persian too."

He sank to his haunches and put his head between his knees. "I have none left."

She pulled a few stones away, but when she ripped off several nails and watched the drops of blood slide down to the stone below, she stopped.

"I will sing a requiem for him," he said.

She had heard that wailing chant pour from Erik's throat before, first when he threw in her face the choice between a wedding and a funeral, and then when he stood dripping with water in the dining room, repeating vaguely to himself, "That man shouldn't have come asking for the time of day."

"Keep it," she said, in the finality of hushed despair. "It will do him no good, not anymore."

He looked up at her. "What about your word? You promised to bring back my ring, and to bury me."

"Have no fear," she said. "Bury you I shall."

She had not hated Erik before, not when he dragged her around by the hair, not when he forced her nails into his corpselike face, not even when he threatened to kill "many members of humanity," as he put it. But she hated him now.

And she planned her revenge.

Years ago, when the young Christine Daae first came to live with Mama Valerius and the Professor, when Mama still had a mind and the use of her legs, she prepared a cedar chest for her young ward. Occasionally Christine would embroider a towel or a pillowcase and throw it in. Once she even covered the edges of a sheet with scalloped crocheted lace.

After a week of tears and dull, laudanum-induced sleep punctuated by nightmares where Raoul screamed for her and was then stifled into silence under waves of earth, Christine woke one morning to a new purpose. She opened her cedar chest and pulled out yards of fine white linen. It was time for her biggest project so far. It was time to sew the bridegroom's shirt.

She cut the square sections out of the tightly-woven fabric. Loose at the neck, flowing, it wasn't necessary to measure. A skeleton is easy to fit, after all.

A girl's husband wore it twice - once on their wedding night, and then as a shroud.

In a bag in the cedar chest she also found some skeins of white cotton embroidery floss. Perfect, she thought.

At first she planned to cut herself on the thigh and catch the blood in a little cup. But why suffer pain in my flesh? she reasoned. There would be blood soon enough. Any day now, in fact, and the next morning there was, in profusion like every month.

She tied on her rags, but in the middle of them put a little white skein of thread. By the afternoon it was soaked clean through, and she replaced it with another. She separated the threads and hung them on a wooden rack in her room to dry.

The maid was given strict instructions to keep out. Mlle. Daae would clean her own room from now on, she was told.

The blood made the threads stiff, so she rinsed them and stained them several times over the next few days. They varied from light terracotta to a deep brownish red.

It's time to embroider, she said to herself. The thick, stiffened threads needed her largest needles. They made unsightly holes in the fine linen, but she didn't care.

It's not as if it's going to be worn more than once, she thought.

Papa knew the old runes, and he taught them to her even before she learned her musical notes or Latin letters. She unbound her hair and took off her shoes, then drew a circle in chalk on the wooden floor of her room, and walked counter-clockwise around it three times. Within the circle she stitched barefoot, uncorseted, and with white-gold hair loose, so nothing would come between her and that which she summoned.

When she accidentally stuck her finger so that a few drops fell on the unsullied white, she worked a rune around them, and smeared the rest of the blood on her cheeks.

All the while she worked, she sang under her breath.

Fire from Muspelheim, she called quietly, and sewed the runes for fire, over and over around the yoked neckline. Ice from Hel, she repeated, and there went the runes for ice. Pain like the jaws of Fenrir slicing off an arm or leg, a river of pain I bring down upon this shirt.

Her fingers bled from the fingerpricks, and over the three days she sewed, the clumsier her fingers became, and the more adamant her curses, until one bleak afternoon she sewed the final runes.

His name, Erik, stitched in blood-red characters. She didn't know his last name, but the first alone would do. It was enough. She held the shirt up, and deemed it finished.

I'm not waiting for word of his death, she said to herself. This shirt must go on a living groom, after all. I'm going back now.

So once more she put the great key in her pocket, the passport to that hellmouth which led down to Avernus, the lake of Hades. She pressed and folded the shirt, and wrapped it in fine paper.

Christine left a wad of money with the little maid. "Take care of her," she said, pointing to Mama Valerius, who sat in her dressing gown absently knitting and humming. "I don't know when I'll be back."

The sun had just set as she slipped into the Rue Scribe entrance of the Garnier Opera. Carefully she checked behind in every direction. I'm wily to the sneaking ways of the Persian now, she thought, and I want no surveillance.

The waters of that charnel lake were still and black, as there was no moon.

"Erik!" She called out. "Erik, can you hear me?"

A soft singing tone came up, seemingly out of the water itself. A dark form beckoned her from across the water, and she quickened her step.

He pulled his mask out of his pocket and put it on.

"What are you doing here?" he said. He gasped for breath and the skin of his neck was very white. He took her by the hand and she recoiled at the cold flesh, clammier than ever, almost dripping with icy moisture.

"I've come back," she said. "To be your 'living wife.' "

He staggered backwards but said nothing at first. Finally he choked out, "You're not here to give back my ring?"

"No," she answered.

"Come in," he said, leading her into his apartments, where a blazing fire burned off the cavern's chill. When she stood in his parlor, sweat beading on her upper lip, he poked the package experimentally and then pulled at it like a child expecting his mother to bring him a box of marzipan. "What's in that?" he asked.

"It's for you," she said sweetly. "A surprise for our wedding night. Don't grab like that."

"Wedding night," he repeated slowly.

"Tonight," she said, tucking the package more securely under her arm. "Tonight we make our promises."

"I had hoped for a wedding before the altar of the Madeleine," he said petulantly, scrutinizing her face for explanation. "I want everyone to hear my nuptial Mass."

"I can't wait," she said softly.

"Sit down," he said, leading her toward the softer of the two fireside armchairs, his eyes never leaving the package.

Instead, she followed him into the kitchen, where she watched him slice onions and chop chicken, his hands trembling so wildly that he nicked himself and bled a little onto the pinkish bloody meat. He sauteed the chicken into a spicy ragout as she sat sipping a white so dry it made her lips pucker. He looked over at her anxiously, as if she would disappear.

Before sitting down to the table she excused herself, and when alone in the bathroom poured down her throat the rest of the laudanum she'd so freely used in the week after Raoul's death, setting the empty bottle on the washstand.

The wedding supper passed in a blur. The chicken should have tasted tender and succulent, but it stuck in her throat. He poured cognac and she swallowed it as quickly as she could, glass after glass.

When the table was cleared, he held the paper-wrapped package in his long hands and delicately opened it. "What is it?" he asked.

Her tongue moved thickly in her mouth a second or two behind her thoughts, and she could hear her words stumble as she said, "It's a Swedish custom for a girl to make for her fiance a 'groom's shirt.' You wear it on your wedding night, and then, after a long and happy married life, you're buried in it."

He pulled her to her feet with hands hot and dry instead of toad-clammy as before.

"You know I will be your husband in every way, always faithful, before God." The room swayed as she stood before him, and he gripped her tighter, steadying her with relentless strength.

"I too," Christine said thickly. "As long as we both shall live."

His dry kiss brushed her lightly on the lips, more like fingers across a bare, defenseless throat than the juncture of two mouths. His eyes glittered as he looked towards her bedroom.

"Of course," she smiled, and off she swayed through a fog of cognac and laudanum.

The room was as she had left it, the bed neatly made, her dresses arranged in the wardrobe like soldiers on parade, her hairbrush lined up exactly with the edge of the vanity. In the bottom bureau drawer were her chemises and nightgowns, all folded more precisely than she ever could.

After donning a nightgown of dove gray silk light as spiderweb, she lay down with arms crossed over her breast like a corpse. The bed rocked like a little boat on the water.

In he came, carrying the shirt.

"You're supposed to put it on," she said.

He headed for the bathroom.

"No," she objected. "In here. With the candle lit, so I can see. Take off your mask, too."

She wondered about Raoul's last thoughts as Erik unbuttoned first his jacket, then vest, facing away from her. Did Raoul know he was going to die? Did a rock strike him all at once, killing him instantly, or did he linger broken and bleeding for days, to die of suffocation or thirst or shock? Did he call my name in despair for help that never came, did he scream, or lie silent and suffering like an animal?

Erik set his clothes neatly on the wingback chair, and she stared at his body in horrified fascination. The soft laudanum cocoon cushioned the sight of his broad shoulders and narrowing back sprinkled with black hair and wens. Hair grew down to the curve of his slim buttocks, the skin interspersed with huge hairless regions the color of mouldy dough, a patchwork quilt from hell.

He may have told many lies, she thought, but that it was a corpse from head to foot who loved me was the unvarnished truth.

Over his motley form, he slipped the wedding garment and came towards her.

She gritted her teeth and opened her arms to welcome him. When he climbed on top of her, the heat of the shirt singed through her nightgown. Curls of smoke rose from the linen, and he twitched convulsively. He clawed at the shirt, but his hand stuck to it and he gave a half-strangled shriek of horror and alarm.

Christine clumsily tried to slip away from his embrace. Weighed down by the laudanum fog, she moved too slowly, too late, as his convulsing body fell onto her and pinned her to the bed. She struggled to escape from under that flesh which pressed down with the force of iron.

Little flames licked around them as the shirt ignited and burst into flames.

She laughed, then, the mirthless cackle of madness, and soon the roaring crackle of the fire from Muspel itself was drowned by their duet of screams.


End file.
